The law around selling adult games is clear. The retailer must ensure they don’t sell to underaged people. Whether the adults buy it and pass it on to their kids is irrelevant.
What i should have shared is this https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/292B-3DA3-CFC8-97F6 That’s what i read, the only reason i sent the other article is because I was talking to someone else about it and that’s the link i had handy. Fully how you’re calling me right wing when you’re perfectly happy for government mandated discrimination against poor people to take place.
Again, the only way the internet works is with an assumption of age or parental guidance. The alternative is tyranny and either unacceptable loss of privacy or discrimination. I’m not willing to accept that compromise for the benefit of parents not having to watch their kids. Simple as that.
An assumption of age? Alright, let’s just assume everyone is 18 and let them just crack on with whatever then. You can’t keep kids safe by relying on parents doing the right thing. Even parents that do want to do the right thing struggle to keep their kids safe online and theirs plenty that don’t give a toss. I still care about those kids, even if they don’t. You’re not willing to accept that compromise to keep kids safe is what you’re saying.
Might as well turn the internet off then. That’s the only thing that will achieve what you’re wanting.
Might as well just let shops hand out alcohol, porn mags and PEGI 18 games and movies to kids and blame the parents if they let their kids out of their sight for a single second during the day and they sneak in and buy one.
I didn't call you right wing. I said you were sharing stuff from the alt right pipeline and I advised avoiding it. Don't put words in my mouth mate. We agree on most things as we're both left wing. But portraying a billion dollar company that exploits the market as the victim because they have to age verify a product they are literally selling, which has preordained age requirements is nonsensical and has almost nothing to do with the problems you highlighted previously. They already require accounts to buy things. The games are already age restricted. They are a massive data controller already working with confidential user data under various national and international laws. Drawing the line here is not because they are unable to action a thing they always could. This isn't some small business or website unable to survive under these rules. It's f**king STEAM. The fact that they refuse to allow verification other than credit card is on them. They are deliberately creating outrage, hoping the backlash will mean they can continue to sell violent games to 15 year olds without their parents involvement. Even with Steams parental guidance, the difficulty in enacting parental protections to a level that stops the child from simply setting up their own Steam is far beyond most parents and would never be enacted widely enough to be effective.
It’s almost like the nature of buying things online or in person is different and one can easily be policed and the other can’t without being discriminatory. Weird.
Their reasons for not wanting to violate the privacy of their users to satisfy a stupid law are valid. As are the reasons of Apple for (so far) refusing to give the government a backdoor into iCloud.
Having to own official ID can be discriminatory if you’re poor and look young enough to need it. Anyway, that’s against the point, your argument is that it should be entirely up to the parents and the law doesn’t need to exist or be enforced.
It already is entirely up to the parents in that they can buy the game for the kid. As i’ve said a million times in order for the internet to be useful there has to be an assumption of age or for an account to be labelled manually on creation as an account for a kid. It’s then up to parents to ensure kids accounts and devices have the right settings on them and yo monitor what their kids are doing. They should be given the tools and education to make that as simple as possible and should face legal consequences if they don’t. That’s it. That’s all that it needs and all that’s realistically possible to achieve.
It’s not up to the parents if the kid buys it behind their back. They can’t keep them in their sight 24/7 and make sure that they never go into the shop and buy them. It needs the shop mandating by law that they cannot sell it to them.
Literally the only reason they have been getting away with this for the last decade is an oversight in not extending the 2012 law on enforcing PEGI to also cover digital copies. For all its faults the OSA closes that. No sympathy for Steam because unlike many of the places you have mentioned this is fully enforceable due to the current setup and unlike the 4Chan argument, it does not breach anyone's free speech. This is sale of prohibited product to minors
